


About Clocks and Losing Grounds

by AlmaLovesCoffee



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 15:27:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16065986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlmaLovesCoffee/pseuds/AlmaLovesCoffee
Summary: He tries but he fails





	About Clocks and Losing Grounds

ABOUT CLOCKS AND LOSING GROUNDS

He's been waiting for her.   
She won't open her door for him.  
There's nowhere to go.   
...

Scully saw them holding hands, whispering. The darkness around them laying open what he had tried to hide from her.

She saw them looking at each other for a second too long. Countless shades of past times lingering in their exchange. Yesterday, at that fateful moment when she called him in the middle of the night and Diana picked up Scully knew. It was there for her to see. For everyone who cared to look. That was one day ago. Yesterday she knew.

...

"Will you ever be able to forgive me?" There's hope, he said to himself. There must be. This thing between them, his only reason to go on and on, this nameless everything that was them, it couldn't be over. That wasn't an option. Yes, he was weak, yes, he had a talent for destroying himself and what surrounded him, but, no - this between them that couldn't be gone.

"You know, Mulder...Let me be honest with you. Every time I look at you I see you two together. I see it in your eyes, in your face, when I look at your hands. It's written all over your skin." She breathed out and it seemed as if all the air she had within her lungs just left her petite body. To him she never looked smaller than in that very moment. The basement was cold and dark and inhospitable around them. She stood, her hand holding the doorknob as if her life depended on it. Ready to leave. Ready to flee.

"There are pictures in my head. You touching her, you making love to her. It's hunting me like a ghost without mercy." In that moment her voice choose to leave her. She looked at him and he saw it in her eyes. All those pictures she was talking about. 

"Scully, please stop..." He was not the betrayed one, but her words, the pain was sinking in every cell of his being. It felt like poison running through his veins. This is how she must feel, he understood. 

She cleared her throat. Her blue eyes dark and still fixed at him. Still torturing herself.

"We all have our preferences and priorities, Mulder. And you've made yours clear. I can see it now. Finally." She said with a voice so alien he almost couldn't recognize it as hers. 

"I'm...sorry, Scully...I..." he tried but her words cut him off.

"Mulder. We both have to accept that there's nothing to be sorry for. It was actually my mistake. I thought there was ... I don't know... maybe some sort of a connection between us. Something without comparison, a unique trust. But I saw something that's clearly not there. And let's be fair that is not your fault." 

She sounded defensive, not the Scully he knew. Suddenly he couldn't see her face in the almost darkness. She looked like a hiding shadow.

"Scully, Diana and I..." He wanted to say something, wanted to defend himself, but suddenly he didn't know how. The words his mind had formed just seconds ago faded into the black silence around them. Whatever he was about to say it didn't matter. Nothing could turn back the clock. 

He stood in the middle of the room, their office, their refugium that stopped being theirs the moment he decided to hide his past from her. His past and that one evening he briefly gave in. He hadn't tell her about it, he didn't know how she found out but he didn’t deny it.

"What is she to you, Mulder? Your undying love? Your first in everything important? Just say it, it can't be that hard." Her voice growing impatient again like her hand on the doorknob. It dawned on him that he hadn't said a complete sentence during their conversation.

“I just want to understand. Were you more than lovers?” she asked suddenly shy.

“What do you mean by that?” his voice cracked.

“I don’t know. Were you engaged or something? …. Married?” 

"What? No, we weren't engaged and we were definitely not married. For God's sake, no. I could never hide something essential like that from you. I mean, you know my file, Scully, and you know me..." He tried.

She noticed that his eyes had lost their green color and had also become dark, something his eyes always seem to be capable of: changing colors. The last time it happened they were talking about Emily.

"It's something else. I've never been someone to talk openly about what's bothering me. Everything that mattered and that happened to me I tied up and hid it somewhere deep within me." 

Things that bother him he keeps secret, she thought sadly. There´s no room for you in his life, just accept it, Dana Katherine Scully! 

"Mulder, I`m sorry. It doesn’t matter, I shouldn’t have asked..." She tried to get back, to find a save ground to walk out of his basement and his life. 

"Scully, let me explain. My childhood, my family life wasn't about picked fences. After what happened to Samantha I tried to run away by hiding in Oxford. I thought I had found my peace but then Phoebe happened. It took me too long to realize that it was happening again. In the end everything got summed up and I found myself losing my ground. Nothing could turn my thoughts into something nice, something worthy."

Where is this conversation leading to, Scully wondered? Nothing he had said was an explanation for his endless trust in Diana Fowley.

"Scully..." he started, "After Samantha and Phoebe I had a heavy depression. That's when I found the X files. And that's when Diana found me. The person that rescued me, that was her. So when I defend her it's not about any old romantic feelings for her. It's about being thankful to someone you can see as my savior."

"And why is your illness not mentioned in your file, Mulder?" It seemed Scully still wasn't ready to believe him. 

"We... Diana and I... We thought it would make being assigned to the X Files pretty hard so we... kinda let this information disappear."

"You did what?!? Are you kidding me?!?" She screamed in a thin voice. Instead of explaining himself it seemed he made it even worse. Hidden secrets, that was the connection between Mulder and Diana Fowley, she realized. Secrets, a love affair, finding the X Files, healing his depression – it seems there was no end to this. With this she couldn’t keep up. 

"Scully. Don't you see why I tried to defend her? She saved me. That's what she was to me, and much later she became my lover. Scully, please..." He saw her shaking her head, her eyes now directed somewhere between her left and her right foot.

"I know you probably don't want to hear it but... it's important to say it. It is for me anyway. Scully, there was never a huge passion between us. We were a couple for about a few months but, Scully, it was mainly about soothing pain and not about love. There's no comparison to what I feel for you because you don't have the least idea what I feel for you."

"And how do you know that, Mulder?" She looked him in the eyes again. Challenging him. The blue of her eyes the only color around them.

"Because I can't explain it. Because it's sounds like a cliché but, what I feel for you… I have never felt something like this before. Scully. The truth is with you I found my ground."

„I don´t understand how you can say that to me but still believe her more than me…!“ Desperation is a flower, he thought, and right now he could see it blossom in her face.

"Scully. You´re talking about it as if this was a comparison. It´s not. I just tried to explain it to you. Don’t you see?” 

He saw her shaking her head again and with that he swallowed his hopes.

“I don't know what to say. Are you really asking me to choose between the two of you?" 

She smiled a sad smile in the darkness. "No, Mulder. You don't need to choose. I did." Her voice tender, like the caress of a lover. 

The doorknob snapped. 

He closed his eyes and shook his head heavily but the painful thoughts and feelings stayed within him. Loyal friends. Like the dead calm that reached out for him.

He's been waiting for her.   
She won't open her door for him.  
There's nowhere to go.   
……………………………………………………….

**Author's Note:**

> A/N
> 
> It's canon that neither Mulder nor Scully were married.   
> I've been a fan of TXF for about 24 years now and I've read A FEW fan fictions :)
> 
> What always kinda bothered me is that it seems that the only explanation for Mulder's stupid (sorry, not sorry) behavior during the Fowley catastrophe is that he was once married to her. Which is, considering what's canon, not true. I know, I know, I know... in a fanfiction there are no restrictions but that's not the point. I was just tired of reading again and again and again about a marriage that never happened, so... That's why I started to analyze Mulder's character a bit more and tried to find a reason that's not too much out of character but VERY important to Mulder and also kinda realistic... 
> 
> So this story came into my mind... The illness, the depression, that later became canon. Anyway, I hope you like the story


End file.
